mental-illness

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“Pull me out of the air crash…”

Well, it’s been a short while since I posted here.  I intended‒vaguely‒to write a post on Friday and then Monday (which was yesterday), but I had a surprise situation happen that I haven’t really discussed with anyone yet, though I might have mentioned it on Threads.

It seems at least some of my underlying distress was evident to some people at work‒I certainly know that I’ve been feeling like I’m coming apart at the seams, and at times in between the seams.  So, on Thursday morning, my boss somewhat quietly came to me and “suggested” that I take a bit of time off.  He suggested 5 days, but if I had come back tomorrow, there would be too much backed up work, so I got it down to 4 days (plus Thursday afternoon).

He said he could tell that I was really getting stressed out and irritable, and that I needed a break; I hadn’t taken any non-sick time off since my mother died.  In and of itself, this was truly kind of him, and that’s completely in character.  On the other hand, he doesn’t understand me all that well.  It’s hard to blame him; I’m a weirdo, after all.

Anyway, he suggested all sorts of absurd things, like getting a hotel room on the beach, drinking cocktails, getting laid, and so on.  Imagine that:  me getting laid on short notice!  I wouldn’t have the comfort level with strangers even to pay to have sex with someone, let alone to pick up or be picked up.  When he made those suggestions, I started to giggle hysterically‒it was a sound that worried and sort of even frightened me‒and I had to suppress it pretty quickly, because if I didn’t, I knew I was going to start to cry.  In any case, I left the office at noon and went back to the house.

As for the beach…

Well, I did do some biking, trying to get used to riding so I could do more, and after riding around the local area a total of about 9 miles on Friday, I decided on Saturday to ride out to the beach and (of course) back, about six miles each way.  It was quite a ride for only my second day back on the bike, but I managed it.  Then I walked down to the beach and saw that at least every human in the western hemisphere was there, so there was no way I was going to remain for long.

I didn’t bring beach gear anyway, having no intention of swimming.  The waves on the Atlantic coast make swimming at the beach there irritating.  The beaches on the Gulf of Mexico are much more pleasant.  Also, I’m about as fond of sand as is Anakin Skywalker.

So, I stopped at a 7-11 for some Gatorade, drank it, and rode back.  Then, on Sunday I biked to the train station and back, which is only about 10 total miles, but it was harder than the day before, probably because I hadn’t fully recovered.

Yesterday, on the other hand, I took a very long, 12-mile walk.  I wore spandex braces on my ankles and my left knee, and these seem to have helped a lot.  I do have a minor blister and a half on my left foot, but otherwise there were no real ill effects.

I probably look as though I partied in some fashion, because I am pretty sunburned.  That’s okay; for some reason, sunburn doesn’t really hurt me much.

So, anyway, I at least got some exercise.  I bought junk/comfort food for a few meals (deliberately) but even my old comfort foods are becoming unappetizing.  That would be okay with me.  In fact, yesterday I ate only a total of around 1000 calories, despite my long walk, because I just wasn’t hungry.  I didn’t even finish all that I “cooked” myself for dinner yesterday.

Being off from work has been at least somewhat fruitful for me, in this at least:  that I have worked on improving my physical condition and have tested my endurance a bit.  Otherwise really, what mostly happened was a harsh, undiluted confrontation with just how empty my life is.

Work is in some ways the most positive part of my current existence; I have to be productive to be worthy of staying alive, and I can interact with my coworkers in ways that are couched in work-related situations.  It is far from fully positive; the noise alone is terribly frustrating.  But then again, I’m pretty much a net negative wherever I am, so it’s hard for me to be judgmental.

When I am at the house, I am fully immersed in how alone I am*.  And things like being at the beach just cement that even more for me.  I do not feel like the same species as everyone else out there.  I don’t know what I am or should be‒I’ve had great past success in all the ways I thought were success, but that all just blew up in my face in the end.

Honestly, I was more than half hoping for a heart attack or some other health crisis or life-threatening occurrence while I was biking and walking over this surprise long weekend.  Perhaps it would have been good to be hit by a car.  One thing I did note was that there are a lot of tall buildings with balconies down along the beach.  That’s something at least a bit interesting.  The bridge over the intercoastal, unfortunately, is rather low there, so it’s not much use.

In all honesty, speaking as a physician about myself, I think what I needed was not a “vacation”.  What on Earth would such as I do on a solitary vacation other than be solitary?  Instead, I would probably recommend that I be hospitalized, if that were available, or at least get some intensive kind of treatment.  But of course, I don’t have insurance, and whatever my boss might think about my finances, I don’t have the wherewithal to pay for much of any medical or psychiatric care.  I also don’t have the mental wherewithal to seek out any such help.

I am finally getting an autism assessment this Friday, and I’m slightly anxious about it.  I fear that it’s going to be utterly negative, and that I’m not autistic, I’m just a defect.

I do find that, even when I try to lurk around autism based sites and feeds and so on, I feel that I still do not fit in with any of them.  Maybe if I get assessed and it’s positive, I will feel differently.  I don’t know.

In any case, I am back to work today, and if I survive until tomorrow, I will punish you all with another stupid blog post.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

*I did have a very nice phone call with my sister on Sunday night.  That’s always enjoyable.

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The universe is rounded at the tip–i.e., it’s pointless

Well, here I am again.  It’s Friday, and I’m writing another blog post.  I don’t know what, if anything, I have to say, but there it is.

Oh, but I do want to give some follow-up that I forgot to give yesterday:  Dorian, the gray cat I’ve fed for quite a while, has not come back again since that one night he returned last week as I mentioned.  I haven’t seen any trace of him.  If I were a superstitious person, I might imagine it was a ghost that came back that one evening to say goodbye.  However, he was quite solid; I gave him a pat, and he even ate some food.

Also, it would take quite a bit of evidence and logical argument to make me even seriously consider the possibility that ghosts are real.

Other than that, nothing much is new with me.  Of course, there are things going on in the world, but there always are.  It’s a little bit like saying that there are molecules always moving in a still glass of water.  It’s true, of course, and it is part of why water has the properties that it has, but the behavior of any particular molecule is inconsequential.  The things that are happening in the world are parochially interesting, but H. G. Wells’s Martians wouldn’t give a shit, nor would anyone else in the universe.  And, of course, the universe itself really doesn’t notice.

So much has happened in the world since it began, and the number of details that are available after even a hundred years is tiny.  It’s also very difficult to know what historical events actually affected the shape of subsequent happenings.  Sometimes, people just notice things and people and events that are loud.  But loud does not equal important, though they can overlap.

I’m almost done‒87% according to Kindle‒with the last light novel in that series I mentioned before*.  Once it’s done, I’m not sure what I’m going to read, or what I’m going to do if I can’t find anything to read.  I imagine doing my random flipping and reading a section at a time in my various science books, or just getting on the various preprint servers and skimming through random recent scientific papers, or of course using Brilliant to review and improve my science and math, or getting on Babbel and actually starting to learn some more languages.  But though these things ought to be interesting, they just aren’t.  Everything is boring.  Of course, such boredom is in the eye of the beholder, and is probably more symptomatic of dysfunction in the mind behind that eye than in the things being seen.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself in the short term.  I mean, if the office is open, I am going to work tomorrow, so I suppose I’ll write a blog post then, though I make no promises.  Maybe I’ll start sharing links to my books on Threads and Blue Sky and all that, like I used to do a long time ago.  I doubt anyone will buy them, but who knows?

I don’t know.  Nothing really means anything to me.  Everything is pointless, but I am especially and particularly pointless.  I guess that’s that for today.  I hope you all have a good day and then a good weekend.  You’ve earned it, after reading my morose musings.

*Actually, after writing the first draft of this post I finished it.

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I don’t have the energy to do a Shakespeare quote title

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and this is technically the 4th blog post of the week, though yesterday’s post felt a bit disjointed and erratic.  I didn’t edit it much, and frankly, I’m not sure I had anything to say 

I did, though, get the “inspiration”, or perhaps the geas, to throw together that little slide-show-style video to the tune of Another Brick in the Wall Part 3 that I shared yesterday.  I did the whole thing in the morning before I posted, and threw it up on here and on Instagram.  I didn’t share a version of it to YouTube, because I figured it might get blocked.  I know it wouldn’t be monetized, but my channel isn’t monetized, anyway.

I don’t know if anyone really caught the meaning I was conveying.  Basically it’s a montage of pictures from my former life, of the people I love whom I no longer see, some of whom are dead, and basically all of whom are gone from my life.  Early on, the pictures are dominated by, or at least include, people who are dead.  Then there are loads of shots of my kids, some including my ex-wife and even me, then some of my coworkers and so on, switching from one to the next to the beat of the song.  Then, at the end, there’s a massively altered picture of me that looks just a bit like I’m made out of bricks:

The point is that, as the song sings, “I don’t need no arms around me…”  It’s showing all the people whose arms are not around me* and probably never will be again, and so on.  It’s appropriate and it is just, though; I’m not a person who is worth embracing.

Anyway, those last two songs on the first album of The Wall have always meant a lot to me, albeit in a very dark way.  They’re basically about giving up, about recognizing that you’re alone and you’re always going to be alone, and that’s just the way it is.  Also, relationships are perilous, especially if you’re the sort of person people tend to end up leaving.  To quote a different song that I’ve already covered, “Everyone I know goes away in the end.”  How can you not want to build a wall?

Some of us come with some sort of pre-built wall that requires active and sustained effort to lower, and which spontaneously regenerates even as you try to break it down.  It gets terribly exhausting.

Of course, it’s the following song from The Wall that’s most prominent to me, and I am going to start working on a video for that, but it won’t be a one morning thing made in a sort of compulsive fever dream state like this last one was.

Yesterday I was so wound up by the time I posted my “video” I had to close my little office door before work because I couldn’t stop crying for a while.  It wasn’t anything extravagant; I wasn’t sobbing or anything.  I was just sort of quietly crying, but it didn’t want to stop, and I didn’t want the people in the office to see me when they arrived.

I’m beginning the final novel of the light novel series I mentioned before, after which I’ll be pretty much done with every book I can find any interest in reading.  I cannot even sustain my interest in the e-book version I found of Susan Kay’s Phantom, which is one of my favorite books.

None of the hundreds of fiction or nonfiction books in my Kindle library catch my attention; they all seem boring.  And none of the books on Amazon seem interesting at all.  Many of them seem just frankly moronic.  To quote another song from The Wall, “…nothing is very much fun anymore.  And I…can…feel…one of my turns coming on.”

I haven’t played any guitar so far this week.  I certainly haven’t written any fiction.  I haven’t drawn anything apart from a weird doodle of a sort of demonic cartoon caterpillar on the top of one of our deal sheets.

I used to do that sort of thing all the time.  In undergrad and in med school, though I always brought a notebook and tried to take notes, that’s never really been the way I learn things.  So, my college and medical school notebooks are a smorgasbord of doodles‒some comical, some dark, some frankly horrifying, some very rough and some rather artistic.  I don’t know what has happened to any of them.

I feel as though I’m approaching the end of all this.  And so, I intend to make a sort of video to the song Goodbye, Cruel World, the last song on the first album of The Wall, and maybe release it as a message.  It’s not an iff** sort of statement.  For instance, I might not finish or post a video and yet still kill myself.  I came pretty close yesterday.  But no one seems to have noticed.

And, of course, even if I post it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I will kill myself or have killed myself.  I might fail, even if I try.  And someone might even stop me.

Ha ha, just kidding.  That last scenario is definitely not gonna happen.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  I hope (and trust) that almost all of you are feeling much better than I am.

TTFN

*Actually, technically, if I were to show pictures of everyone whose arms are not around me and will not be, I’d have to show pictures of everyone in the world, which would take too much time.

**That’s mathematics-speak for “if and only if”.

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…since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: your noble blogger is mad.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday.  That’s why I did the whole “hello and good morning” thing.  I started doing that, not thinking much about it, when I first started my weekly blog as a would-be promotion for my fiction.  Then, when I started doing posts every workday, I still made it a point to use that phrase on Thursdays.  That’s the kind of odd person I am:  I keep traditions and habits that absolutely no one cares about, because really, nothing I do is actually consequential to anyone, including me.

I seriously think I may just stop doing this now.  In fact, yesterday, my tentative plan was to come on today and do a post with the title “I’m not doing this anymore”, and with content consisting of “It’s just a waste of my time and that of anyone who reads it.  Oh, well.  Whatever. Never mind.”  And that was going to be that.

But I figured maybe I would give a slightly more polite sendoff, so here it is.  Who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind.  I can’t readily make or maintain any commitments right now‒except, it seems, for the commitment to use some version of “Hello and good morning” on any Thursday blog post, for what that’s worth.

All sorts of little ideas and thoughts come into my head about what I want to do.  I want to learn more quantum mechanics and relativity.  I want to start to learn Russian, or learn more Japanese, or bone up on my Spanish.  I want to start “audio book” recordings for Son of Man.  I want to make video recordings of me playing and singing various songs, like Ashes to Ashes, The Man Who Sold the World, or One Headlight, or Nothing Compares 2 U, or any of a number of other songs I can play and sing reasonably well.  I want to get a new acoustic guitar.

I want to finish my started and planned works of fiction. I want to draw.  I want to paint.

I want to try to get an “official” diagnosis of ASD (or not).

I want to wipe out the whole human race and all other life on Earth.

(None of these things is likely to happen.)

More than anything else, I want…well, I don’t know how to put it but that I want to be able to rest.  But I can’t seem to do it, not unless I’m deathly ill.  I’ve already been awake today since 1 am‒no slipping in and out of a doze this time‒and that was after only maybe two and a half hours of sleep.  I’m so tired.  But I’m not sleepy.

TTFN

P.S. – The picture above is an original work.

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Pulling a trigger warning

[Seriously, I talk about suicidal thoughts and ideas of methods, as well as self-harm here, and I don’t want to trouble anyone who might be “triggered” by this…I do enough damage to people who are even figuratively close to me, and I don’t want to do that even more, so if this will, or even might, upset or worsen your mental state, please don’t read any more of it.]

I was a bit hypo-manic yesterday morning or something; sorry about my little tangent fest.  Today I mean to keep things shorter.

Work has been hectic and too up-and-down for easy tolerance lately.  Today is payroll day, so I’m going in early to get that done, but it will be chaotic and urusai and stressful no matter what.

I used to be able to deal with stress, not by avoiding stressful things but by not letting things bother me, by keeping things in perspective, by having good enough personal support systems in place, by having a good philosophical outlook, by meditating, what have you.  No longer.  The person I used to be is dead.  His remains are just sitting here and rotting, as you would expect from an unburied, unpreserved corpse in a hot, humid climate.

I hate my life.  Honestly.  Seriously.  I am trapped in this idiotic universe full of even more idiotic creatures and things, of which I am a prime example.  There is, of course, a way to escape, but to avail oneself of it requires courage, and I haven’t yet been able to work that courage up.  I’m trying.  I’ve come close.  It’s only a matter of time.  A natural 20 may be a relatively hard “saving throw”, but it will happen eventually.

It’s funny, but it occurred to me lately‒thinking frequently about such matters, as I am‒that it would be easier for me to shoot myself in the gut, sort of Van Gogh style, than to shoot myself in the head.  It’s hard to say why, exactly.  I have “played” Russian roulette once, and though I did pull the trigger (barrel in mouth, aimed as carefully as I could), I didn’t go for a second turn.  I just cried by myself in my stupid old apartment.  And that was before I even went to jail or prison for trying (cluelessly, it must be said) to help relieve the suffering of other people experiencing chronic pain.

I came to a realization when I responded to something someone on Threads said‒about just wanting to be shot in the head‒by saying that I would rather take it in the gut, because it would be slower and more painful.  I realized that I really would find it easier to shoot myself in the belly than the head.  Perhaps it’s because I could then experience the process and the pain.  Maybe it’s because it would give me a sort of chance to change my mind at the last minute or something.  I don’t know.  I suppose at some level I’m still a coward.  Anyway, I don’t own any guns anymore, so it’s a bit moot.

Weirdly enough, I doubt that I would be able to stab myself in the gut, let alone do anything like seppuku.  This is probably at least partly because one has to apply the force oneself, whereas with a gun, the bullet rockets out quickly and without hesitation once the trigger is pulled.

Using fire would be hard, too.  I know that I’m able to burn myself deliberately, because I do it from time to time (twice, yesterday) but it’s always at least a little startling how much it hurts, at least for an instant.  It can actually be almost invigorating, especially when some surprising little phenomenon happens, such as something in your skin giving a little “pop” when hot metal touches it.

A whole body process would be quite intimidating, though.  I have enough flammable liquids to do it, but I think that would be most appropriate for some sort of public statement of a death.  I’ve thought of going to sit out in front of the Palm Beach County courthouse (where the finishing blows to my life were delivered) and immolating myself, but you want to make sure you’re committed completely before trying something like that.  Otherwise it would be very embarrassing.

Maybe the best way, by some measures‒other than actual medically provided euthanasia, perhaps with some combination of high-dose valium, fentanyl, and digoxin‒would be hypoxemic asphyxiation, when you would just sort of go lightheaded and “faint” and, if you’ve done it right, just drift away.  I gathered the equipment for this not too long ago.

But of course, if you’re interrupted, or you accidentally dislodge your apparatus while losing consciousness, you could just get brain damage from hypoxemia and not even die.  To be honest, I don’t know how much worse my brain could possibly even be than it is now, but it’s a fact of reality that things can always get worse, even if it’s not true that they can always get better.

It would be good if something (not someone) else took it out of my hands.  Every time I start getting better from a respiratory infection I feel disappointed.  Where is the pneumonia that will develop over top of my URI and usher me away from this shit hole of a universe?

It’s a cliché that if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself.  It isn’t easy.  But I’m working on it.

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The noonday demon lurks everywhere

It’s Monday morning and, yes, I’m writing another blog post.  Isn’t it exciting?

I’m basically doing this because I have nothing else to do.  By which I mean I have no other real outlet on any kind of regular basis.  I don’t write fiction anymore, I don’t draw (or paint…nor do I do any sculpting, for that matter, but I haven’t done that in nearly 35 years).  I haven’t even diddled around on the guitar in about two weeks, and I haven’t played any kind of keyboard in far longer than that.  I certainly haven’t played any video games in I don’t know how long (unless you count the Euchre app on my phone).

I tried to download a chess app.  Well, actually, I did download one; it’s not as though that’s challenging.  What I tried to do was get interested in chess.  However, before I’d even gotten through one game against the computer, I’d remembered just how boring I find chess, even though I won that game.  It didn’t help that, because it was a free app, ads would pop up that would supersede the game now and then.  I uninstalled it.

Similarly, I tried again to get on Brilliant dot org and learn and/or review some stuff, and that was fine as far as it went, but the stupid Brilliant people (somewhat of an oxymoron, I guess) have the app set up so that it sends all sorts of irritating emails and (if you let it) cell phone notifications about how your “streak” is going to come to an end, so you should go and do a couple of review problems to continue it…it’s so annoying that I don’t go back on the app, and if it weren’t for the fact that I’m supporting Sabine Hossenfelder by using it, I would unsubscribe, so I would no longer be tempted to annoy myself.  People at Brilliant take note:  my loyalty to Sabine goes only so far.

It’s a shame, because I kind of like doing the stuff on Brilliant when I’m doing it, but the last thing I want is to trigger all those intrusive proddings that make me want to find where Brilliant is headquartered and burn the building to the ground.

I also have the Babbel app, and though I had briefly started learning a bit of conversational German, I fell off that (again, after irritating emails and push notifications).  Still, I think now I may try to start learning some Russian.  There’s nothing political in this, it’s just an interesting language.  It’s different enough from English to be engaging, and Mila Kunis speaks Russian.  So do many of the people in Ukraine (they don’t offer Ukrainian on Babbel, but I figure Russian would be a start) and as the Beatles sang, “The Ukraine girls really knock me out, they leave the West behind.”  Ha ha.

Anyway, I like languages, generally.  I’ve often said that language (especially written language) is the greatest invention of the human race, the one that made nearly every other invention possible.  Learning another language helps you understand your own language more deeply, and to get a sense of the nature of language itself, how it varies, what things are constant, and so on.

So, I set myself up to start Russian, but I didn’t actually start it yet.  Is that what they call “executive dysfunction” nowadays?  In my case it might be better called “middle-management dysfunction”, or perhaps even “janitorial dysfunction”…though that latter sounds like it might be a euphemism for incontinence.

I don’t know what to do.  Nothing is really interesting.  Certainly nothing is fun.  Nothing really even gives me any relief from anhedonia; I can only distract myself through autogenous damage, if that’s a term.  Cuts are best, but burns are less obtrusive‒people tend to freak out about blood too much, whereas no one can see burns at the moment they occur.  Burns leave deeper and more damaging scars, also, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I’m trying to read an old, previously abandoned light novel series that I’d started because I liked the anime.  When I’m done with that‒which will be soon‒I think I’m going to be out of anything I can even force myself to read.

All of this is trivia, of course; it doesn’t matter‒because I don’t matter.  I don’t do any good for anyone, including myself.  I don’t really interact with anyone, except a weekly (ish) phone call with my sister.  I don’t have any friends to talk to or with whom to hang out; everyone I love has at some point decided they no longer want to be around me, so I don’t intend to fall into that trap ever again.  My memory is too damn good for me to forget how much that shit hurts.  It all still hurts.

“Life is pain, Highness,” the Dread Pirate Roberts said.  But it is not mandatory.  One can opt out if one so wishes.

I hope you all have a good day.

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Still here, for the moment. Not happy about it.

I’m not going to write a full blog post this morning; I have too much to do at the office, since it’s payroll day.  I want to try to get as much of that done as early as I possibly can, so I don’t want to spend too much time editing and sharing this.

Anyway, I don’t get the impression that it makes much difference, certainly based on yesterday’s number of readers‒though maybe that number has significantly increased since last I looked.  Nevertheless, I guess I feel that, since I’m still around, I might as well inflict a small sample of my personality onto the world at large*.  It’s not as though I have any reason to be nice to the world.

So, there’s no real topic here, today.  That’s okay.  Everything is moribund, and more so with me than with most people online.  I feel that it won’t be long at all before I post my last blog post, and I’ve probably already shared my last song and maybe I’ve even made my last video.

If, when it comes down to it, I know that it’s my last post that I’m writing (or that it is probably so) I will try to make it clear here, though I might postdate the publication of it so it arrives after the fact, so to speak.  It will probably involve quotes and/or snippets from various songs and possibly poems, and maybe the specific sharing of the last song on the first disk of The Wall.

More on that if it develops.  Otherwise, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day.

*So that people won’t feel bad when I stop doing it.  ^_^

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And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale blog of thought

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again—the first Thursday of the new year, the first Thursday of the month, and the second day of 2025 (AD or CE depending upon your preference).

I’m heading in to the office already this morning.  It’s not the first day back to work in the new year, though; we worked yesterday, as well, and it was quite a longish day.  We also worked on New Year’s Eve, though we got out an hour earlier than we would have because I shook my head and expressed some outrage (I was in an even more foul mood than usual) that we were not getting off early.  I didn’t have any celebration to attend nor anyone waiting for me, but I thought others might want to get to something of the sort, and anyway, I just really wanted to escape the noise.

It was ridiculous that we worked yesterday (though unfortunately it turned out to be a successful business day).  In the plaza in which our office sits, we were the only business open, and this is a full-scale strip mall with dozens of shops and restaurants and offices.  The people at work who wanted vapes or to get something from the bakery or from the nearby restaurant were all out of luck.  The only places open were gas stations and our office.

Oh, and also my coworker, the one with whom I share various duties, was out sick Tuesday and left early yesterday.  This is not his fault, obviously, unless you mean it’s a design fault, but that fault is true of everyone, and my coworker certainly didn’t design himself.  But it meant that, especially on Tuesday, when I had to do payroll in addition to the other stuff, I was particularly frazzled.

It didn’t help that I knew, quite painfully, that I was not going to be “celebrating” the new year.  Why would I celebrate it when I had wished or yearned throughout the year for 2024 to be my last year?

In fact, on Tuesday—that was New Year’s Eve, in case you didn’t put that together and/or you’re reading this well after it was written—when I was feeling more horrible and stressed out and angry and sad than even I have felt in a long time, I developed a plan, if it merits that term.  I was not hungry during the day, and so I did not eat anything at all.  It occurred to me that I had a half a bottle of Jack Daniels at the house and about half a bottle of vodka as well.  They have both been there for quite some time, since I rarely drink.

My thought was this:  I’ve been on a relatively low carb diet for a few weeks, so I have relatively little stored glycogen relative to the usual amount; what glucose was in my system was probably largely the product of gluconeogenesis, which is the creation of sugar from various amino acids, mainly by the liver.  I figured on stopping at a gas station near the train station when I was heading back to the house and picking up some bottles of Diet Coke (which also has no sugar, of course) and then that evening drinking vodka and Diet Coke and Jack and Diet Coke, all on an empty stomach.  This would have not only the obvious effects of alcohol in disinhibiting behavior, but ethanol also suppresses gluconeogenesis—this fact is responsible for at least some of the typical effects of a hangover.

My thought process, if it merits those words, was basically to hope to get drunk enough and hypoglycemic enough either maybe to have a seizure (unlikely) or just to loosen my inhibitions enough that I would have the courage to use one of the means of suicide that I keep always nearby nowadays*.

When I thought about my plan, though, as the day went on and I finally headed back to the house, it seemed like a pain to stop in the gas station.  I was already exhausted.  I figured, okay, well, I can just drink liquor straight.  Once you get started, once the alcohol begins to take effect, drinking it becomes easier.  However, the thought of being drunk felt very unpleasant, and more importantly, I knew that if I did not work up the strength to go through with my “plan”, drinking the alcohol, especially with no food, would probably lead to a severe exacerbation of my chronic pain.

So, instead, I watched some stupid videos, feeling regretful but not willing to risk worse pain in an attempt to do an end run around the bastard urge for self-preservation and escape my constant physical and psychical pain.  I took something to help me go to sleep (which I don’t usually do on work nights), and I puttered around listening to the sound of all the amateur fireworks going off, feeling annoyed by them, for several hours, and I did not die—not even of natural causes.  And despite my attempts, I slept less than usual, largely because of the noise, but also partly due to my (very inner and apparently unrecognizable to others) turmoil.

And here I am, writing the first blog post of the new year.  I’m alive, and I’m not happy.  I have no friends, my family is far away, and I certainly have no capacity to try to upend and alter where I am, anyway, not on my own—the very prospect of trying to change my life, to move, to go somewhere else, these things are horribly stressful inherently, and I have no strong reason to think any of them would make any difference for me.  I am fundamentally alone, and I probably have always been so, despite past temporary delusions to the contrary.

Of course, so is everyone else, I guess, depending on how you mean it.

Anyway, here we are.  I’m working this Saturday, so I guess I’ll probably write a post then, too.  How lucky for you and for me, right?

yippee.

Well, my train’s about to arrive.  I hope you enjoyed this little, shitty blog post, and that you’re having just a wonderful new year already.  Yeah, right.

TTFN

*I have no fewer than two good lengths of rope, both tied into quite good nooses; a goodly supply of flammable liquids (more than three gallons) with which I could self-immolate; of course I have numerous blades, including very sharp razors and scalpels and box cutters and the like, with which I could open up some arteries; and I have various OTC medications that, especially in combination, could be toxic enough to be lethal.  Also, I’ve been scouting the area for easily accessible high places without closed-in roofs (mainly parking structures) which are high enough that, if I jumped, it would probably be fatal.  I have no guns anymore, alas, but there’s always the nearby Atlantic Ocean, always within sensible walking distance, and then again, there’s always just the long, open road.

by

No one is to blame

Well, as often happens on the day immediately following a Monday, it is now Tuesday.  Congratulations.

I don’t know why I wrote “congratulations” there.  I felt as if I were saying that the fact that Tuesday has arrived was some manner of accomplishment and not merely the universe continuing to do what it does and work through its laws as always.

Maybe the thought was to congratulate those of you who consider it a positive thing to live another day for succeeding at doing so.  Maybe it’s a supportive statement to those who really don’t want to go on, but who continue to endure because they don’t want to bring pain to their loved ones.  Making it through another day for a person in that situation is no joke, and those people should be recognized.

It would be nice if they could be recognized in a non-judgmental way by those loved ones for whom the people in question endure.  Not that I expect that the loved ones of the suffering have any better calibration than the people who love them.  Nothing finite is without imperfections (and I’m agnostic about the situation with infinite things, but I have my doubts).

So, it is hard for a person with depression to endure, even when they’re doing it for their family and friends and are suffering because of it, and those depressed people are worthy of sympathy and non-judgmental support from their loved ones and the world in general.  But the people around them are worthy of sympathy, too, and should not be regarded judgmentally for not being able to recognize or even help their loved ones’ suffering.

Here’s where we come to the concept of blame, and how utterly unjustified it is, in every single case.  And to be clear, I don’t mean to say we shouldn’t hold people responsible for their actions in the sense that they are the proximate causes of those actions, and their behavior can be adjusted and improved.  But they are not the ultimate cause‒not of what they are, not of their strengths and weaknesses, not of their limits and their experiences and their sensory acuities and their social skills 

If you have car trouble and your cousin, with whom you are hanging out, doesn’t know the first thing about cars‒doesn’t own one, doesn’t drive, never has‒you may well be disappointed that this cousin can’t help you and doesn’t even recognize that there is a problem until and unless your car completely breaks down.  But you don’t get self-righteously angry at your cousin for that lack of knowledge and skill‒not if you’re even remotely reasonable.  You don’t fully understand what’s wrong with your car, yourself, and you certainly don’t know how to fix it.  And it’s your car.  How can you expect others to be both able and willing to fix your car for you?  They have their own vehicular maintenance issues.

I’m pushing the metaphor, I know.  But I think it’s a good one.  We can all, of course, try to be there for those we love, and to be worthy of having others be there for us, and sometimes that’ll work out and sometimes it won’t.  It can be quite natural to feel resentful and wounded by the people who fail to see your suffering, even though they care about you and are important to you.  But, as Radiohead sang, “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”  So cut other people slack; and cut yourself some if you can, too.

You didn’t build the universe, or the world, or your nation, or your community.  Neither did anyone else, living or dead.  These things just happened, rarely with any kind of coherent, before-the-fact plan of any kind.  And on the rare occasion when people did try to plan things, those plans essentially always went aglee‒the stricter and more regimented and more dogmatic the plan, the greater the apparent tendency to veer wildly astray, as though there were some manner of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that applies at the scale of societies.

Civilization is a spontaneously self-assembled and self-assembling system, and like frost on a window, different parts of it carry different orientations and patterns that are not the product of any of the individual constituent water molecules.  The molecules can only line up in the crystal where there is a spot and only in particular orientations, based entirely upon where it is in the system and what the surrounding dynamics are‒and what came before.

This may be the case for the entire universe, as well.  The underlying quantum fields may just all “crystallize” out in particular ways that are highly stochastic and ultimately local, with different kinds of complexity in different places.

Anyway, I’m veering off topic.  The point is, there’s no call for and no use in blaming people for not knowing about your suffering and how they might have done differently and it might have helped you.  And don’t blame yourself, either‒unless you invented the universe.  If you did, well, you’ got some ‘splaining to do.

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O Caesar! These blogs are beyond all use…

Hello, and yes, good morning.  It’s the 1st Thursday of December in 2024, and so it is time for another edition of my weekly blog post.

I’m writing this on my miniature laptop* on the way in to the office, because I figured it would be a shame to let the device go to waste.  I haven’t used it at all since the last blog post I wrote on it, which would have been…looks like it was November 20, 2024.

Other than the little post I wrote on Monday—which I wrote on my smartphone—I haven’t written anything this week.  I haven’t played any music this week, by which I mean neither have I played it on a device for me to hear, nor have I played the guitar or the keyboard, though I guess I’ve tapped drumbeats on walls and desktops and door jambs and the like from time to time.

I am reading a Japanese light novel series, one that I’ve chosen because the characters are at least reasonably likeable, the story is more or less upbeat and decently written and translated, and there are enough volumes out to keep me busy for a week or two.

I haven’t read any science or math or philosophy in quite a while.  I certainly haven’t written on any books of my own.  I haven’t even watched any science-related videos, to be honest.  The only math I’ve done was when I saw a Facebook post of a sign in Taiwan or China that had an infinite series in sigma form written on it.  I thought I recognized the series, but I wasn’t at all sure, so I worked out the first seven or so terms and summed them up, and it became clear that this was the series that summed to Pi.  It was indicating, apparently, that there were 3.14 kilometers left in what I think was a marathon route.

You wouldn’t see a sign like that in the USA.  Though we have some truly brilliant people in mathematics and science and whatnot, they are a rarefied bunch, and the vast majority of the population is borderline mathematically illiterate, and some of them are stupid enough to be proud of that fact.

I did have one slightly interesting occurrence yesterday—from my point of view.  I was scrolling through “reels” on Facebook and saw one with a woman sitting in a room and giving a sort of strained, tiny smile, and the caption read something like, “I guess the fact that it’s holiday decorations that are hanging now, and not yourself, makes it a successful year.”  That’s not quite right; it was better written, but that was the gist.

I recall thinking, not entirely seriously, “That’s easy for you to say.  I don’t consider it a good result that I’m not the one hanging.  I even have two ropes already prepared for that possibility, but I don’t have any decorations or ornaments, and I have no one with whom to share the holiday season or anything anyway.”

I intended to write that (more or less) as a comment, which required going to the original post on Instagram; I was going to try to be at least a bit jokey about it, so as not to make the poster think was angry at her.  But when I got to the post, I saw that there were people who were complaining about it, saying that jokes about suicide were in bad taste or something, that they had lost relatives or friends or whatever to suicide, and such posts made them feel sad or something.  They had a long string of comments.

A few people wrote in response that such “jokes” or posts, even if seemingly morbid, were often a good way for people to deal with the emotions that overwhelm them, and knowing that other people feel that way and can speak about it was helpful.

But the Puritans were all too stuck in scolding mode.

I wanted to write more, but ended up just saying, “Surely no one has been forced to read this posting.”  The original poster, apparently, replied to my comment, saying that I was wrong, that she was sorry to have been insensitive to people, and wanted to try to be more careful in the future.  I had to bite my figurative tongue to keep from replying, “I was wrong?  You mean people were forced to read the post?”

And then I wanted to add something along the following lines:

“As someone who thinks about suicide daily, ever more so over time, and who feels the urge particularly strongly at this time of year, what with the waning sunlight and the holiday environment, it can be kind of nice to know that other people are thinking similarly, and are even able to be somewhat lighthearted about it–even going so far as to give a slight joke, to try to be positive.  I think all the people who are scolding and berating should be turning their scorn on themselves, if anything.  Maybe if they’d spent less time being so eager to shut other people down when talking about uncomfortable things, they might have encouraged a situation in which their own loved ones might have felt able to talk about their depression and despair.  Maybe these commenters are feeling defensive about the fact that, for all that they’re willing to berate strangers for talking about suicide (in a comparatively light hearted way) what they really need to do is berate themselves for not having done anything of significance to try to help their relatives or friends or acquaintances who were in such pain that they ended their lives.  Maybe if they tried to encourage a climate in which people felt able to talk about the despair that so many people experience—especially people who are “different”, who are, for instance, “neurodivergent” or who just feel weird and alien compared to everyone else on this waste of a planet—then fewer people would feel utterly alone and at a loss and with no apparent answer to their pain and loneliness other than destroying themselves.”

Of course, I didn’t leave that comment.  But it is terribly irritating that people go out of their way to comment negatively about someone who is trying to put out at least a slightly uplifting or relieving thought, but I doubt they went to any trouble at all to support their “loved ones” who were suffering.  Fuck all of them, I say, and in all the most inappropriate and uncomfortable orifices.  They’re making the world worse, not better, with their “Waah, look at how this all affects me, everyone, I don’t like to be reminded about sad things, because I did nothing to prevent or ameliorate the sadness, so now I want to make sure no one else admits that it exists”.

Well, the maker of that reel apologized, but I don’t think she should have, and I am certainly not doing so, though I restrained myself from hurling my ire at those people in the comments section, and only left my original one.  But if I could, I would like to give those people a brief taste of the despair and solitude and emptiness and pain that a person feels when they are severely depressed and suicidal but don’t have anyone they can really talk to about it, no support, since our society still doesn’t deal with mental health issues almost at all.

Even if I could do that, it probably wouldn’t help.  Once that temporary pain went away, those people would almost certainly go back to the way they were before.

That’s enough for now.  I’ve written too much, and the editing process is daunting.  I think I’m only going to give it two go-throughs before posting, instead of three.

I hope most of you—well, all of you—feel better than I do.  If I were convincingly told (by some being who could guarantee it) that by my death I could eliminate depression and despair in the world in everyone else, or even that I could just foster an environment in which people could be open about it and help could be provided at least to the same degree we provide it for heart disease and cancer and infectious disease, then that would be a pretty east decision.

But, of course, reality doesn’t work that way, and there’s no reason to think it ever will.  That still doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, legitimate, valid reasons for a person like me to feel that he and everyone else would be better off—or at least no worse off—if I were dead already.

“Oh well, whatever.  Never mind.”

TTFN

*The miniature laptop is a computer.  The top of my own literal lap, though slightly reduced due to my paunch, in certainly not miniature.

**In English, of course—I’m not partaking of my old ambition to practice reading Japanese until I got truly good at it.  What’s the point?  They would never allow me in the country, anyway, thanks to my “criminal” record***.

***That’s actually kind of funny…what if nations didn’t allow President-elect Trump into their countries because of his felony record?  Of course, that’s not going to happen, it would be a diplomatic disaster.   Once again, the Donald shows that he can successfully be separated from the enforcement of the law, thus sending what ought to be a message to the American people:  Why should you bother obeying any inconvenient laws?  The President doesn’t!  Screw paying taxes or following through on contracts!  It’s every person for itself, in the most short-sighted, opportunistic, petty ways possible.

****Who would ever choose such a thing?  Its very nature is learned helplessness, self-hatred, emotional and physical pain that doesn’t seem to let up, that feels eternal when it’s happening.  It is a metaphorical and sometimes nearly literal version of Hell.